Welcome to our Visually Impaired Help Page
If you are a visually impaired visitor to our website, there are a number of things you can try in order to improve your browsing experience, click on the speaker icons located adjacent to the Help sections below to listen to pre-recorded speech playback mini descriptions. It is probable that a combination of the help topics below will provide the best option based on individual user preferences.
There are ‘Say It’ Text to Speech buttons located on every domain page, see Help 5, over 95% of all domain content, including newsletter and other archive documents can be played back as speech, click speaker icon to listen to an introduction example:
Help 1:
Keyboard Zoom: Your Windows computer includes a keyboard ‘Zoom’ feature allowing you to zoom in or out of any page display, this feature also works with all browser pages and can be used to enlarge the displayed page to provide comfortable viewing. When you have decided your ‘best’ zoom scale, it will be retained for all new browser windows/tabs until you reset it.
Just click anywhere on the displayed page and use the following keyboard key combinations:
To enlarge the screen display use the following key combination: Ctrl key with Plus key (hold down Ctrl key and at the same time click + key), you can Pan across or up and down the screen using any of the keyboard arrow keys.
To shrink the screen display use the following key combination: Ctrl key with Minus key (hold down Ctrl key and at the same time click - key).
To return the screen display to its ‘normal’ display size, use the following key combination: Ctrl key with Zero key (hold down Ctrl key and at the same time click 0 key).
Tip 1: If the zoom does not work, click anywhere on the screen and repeat the key combination.
Tip 2: If only text is zoomed, please check your browser tools/options menu and un-check ‘zoom text only’ option.
Tip 3: All browsers have their own built in zoom controls, which you can use, but the above key combinations are usually simpler to use.
Tip 4: You can zoom in using multi-touch gestures if your computer has a multi-touch screen or your laptop has a multi-touch touch pad , or use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out - hold the Ctrl key down whilst rotating the mouse wheel (or use the scroll zone on your laptop touch pad). This function may not be supported on all devices. Multi-touch is also the means of zooming for Smartphones and Tablets.
Help 2:
PDF files: Most documents contained on our website are in PDF file format, which when displayed, can be displayed as ‘fit-to-page’ and ‘page width’ or can be zoomed in/out using the PDF window ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons.
Help 3:
Photo Gallery: Our Photo Gallery slide shows can be displayed in ‘full screen’ mode
by clicking on the control bar icon 
return to normal display by using the ESC keyboard
key.
Help 4:
Magnifier: Windows 7 has quite a reasonable built-in Magnifier, this can be accessed by going to the Start button, hover mouse over ‘All Programs’ and selecting, in turn, the following choices, Accessories, Ease of Access, and click on Magnifier. You can also right click on Magnifier and choose Pin to Start Button or other choices.
Click here for Windows 7 Magnifier Help.
Important: Before opening Magnifier you need to know how to close it - this is achieved by using the key combination ‘holding down the Windows Icon Key whilst pressing the ESC key.
Help 5:
Say-It TTS: You can use the ‘Say-It’ Text-To-Speech button to listen to selected text playback, the selected text has to be on the web page where the button is located (see below for alternative usage with any selectable text). For this ‘free’ version, there is a limit of 1000 characters in any selection.
Just highlight the text by selecting it with the cursor and click on the ‘Say It’ button. A new window will open containing the online player, after a few moments the text will be loaded and playback will commence assuming your computer has an active audio capability. Close this new window to return to this page.
To use this feature for any off-page text or PDF document e.g. newsletters, click on the ‘Say It’ button without highlighting any text, then go to any web site page containing selectable text, highlight the text and use the Windows ‘copy’ function, Ctrl key with C key (hold down Ctrl key and at the same time click C key). Paste this copied text to the ‘text entry window of the player using Ctrl key with V key (hold down Ctrl key and at the same time click V key).
Then click on the ‘Say It’ button as shown in the graphic below:
Should highlighted text not work, use the ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ option as described above, this can happen if the page is an off-site page, or a PDF document e.g. Newsletters.
Help 6:
Speech Recognition/Voice Control: It is possible to control the zoom scale of a browser window using voice commands, also Say IT text recording and playback can be controlled by voice commands. In fact, virtually the entire Windows interface can be voice controlled.
For beginners guide to Windows Speech Recognition, click on the link below:
For list of voice commands, click on the link below:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/Common-commands-in-Speech-Recognition
For browser window zoom control using Speech Recognition, please click ‘here’ for printable user instruction.
Click here on player window to commence playback
